Peter Sissons tips Adam Crozier to succeed Lord Patten

With Lord Patten's authority 'draining away,' Peter Sissons suggests Adam
Crozier, the ITV boss, as the next chairman of the BBC Trust.

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Adam Crozier, Chief Executive of ITVPhoto: JANE MINGAY

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Lord Patten

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Peter SissonsPhoto: REX

By Tim Walker

7:15AM GMT 03 Mar 2013

With Government sources now seemingly briefing against him, Lord Patten may well be wondering how long he can cling on to his job as the £110,000-a-year chairman of the BBC Trust.

Alas, Peter Sissons, the former BBC anchorman who remains a wily and well-informed observer of the corporation, can offer few, if any, words of comfort.

“The problem for Patten is that no one now appears to back him as chairman, and when that spreads to Cabinet level, all authority drains away,” says Sissons, who suggested in his entertaining autobiography, When One Door Closes, that the BBC was institutionally biased to the Left and chaotic.

“Support for Patten is practically zero inside the BBC – the place is like a morgue,” Sissons adds. “He is simply not the sort of chairman that Tony Hall [the incoming director-general] needs. It can’t go on, and even Patten must see that.”

If Patten does not jump, Sissons does not rule out the possibility of David Cameron giving him a helping hand. “There is certainly precedent. Do you remember when, in the Sixties, Harold Wilson overnight replaced the then BBC chairman Lord Normanbrook with the ITA chairman Lord Hill? Mind you, Lord Hill ended up going native within a few weeks.”

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With Patten’s body still warm, Sissons even suggests a replacement for him. “I wonder if Adam Crozier fancies another challenge?” Sissons ruminates about the ITV boss who had steered the Royal Mail Group through a controversial modernisation programme. “Now, that would put the cat among the pigeons”. The musings of these old BBC hands are worth heeding. It was Anna Ford who predicted in Mandrake in early November last year that Hall would be appointed D-G.

Athletes beat MPs to the Palace

The three garden parties that the Queen hosts at Buckingham Palace this summer look like they will be attended by fewer national and local politicians. At Westminster, this has not gone down well, where I am told, it will be a question of dozens rather than hundreds getting invitations.

A Palace spokesman declines to get into “quotas,” but says: “A number of athletes and support staff will be invited by the Queen to the three garden parties in London. These guests will be joined by many thousands of others who have contributed in some other way to their communities.”

Edwina is mistress of pest control

It is an intervention that Sir John Major, with whom she had a four-year affair, might not find altogether helpful. Edwina Currie has taken it upon herself, in the wake of the allegations against Lord Rennard, to advise the women of Westminster on how to deal with advances from men.

“Tell him that, unless he backs off, you will injure him where it matters. A threat to tell his wife (there usually is one) can be very effective,” the former junior health minister, pictured, counsels.

She adds: “There are sex pests in most parties, though I’d agree that the Lib Dems seem backward in making clear that such behaviour won’t be tolerated.”

Sir John was certainly no “sex pest” – theirs was a consensual affair – but, doubtless, he would now regard her as a bit of a pest. She only went public about their fling because she was miffed he failed to acknowledge her existence in his memoirs.

All is revealed

Lady Mary Charteris, the daughter of the Earl of Wemyss, raised eyebrows with the semi-transparent white dress that she wore for her marriage to Robbie Furze in 2011. Now, the 25-year-old model, eager to establish herself in the music industry, has made a video in which she sits naked in a bath filled with goldfish. 'She’s serious about music,’ a pal says. 'But she knows what has to be done to get noticed.’